When just this variety of nonsense can blow to smithereens a news cycle or several, and along with them trust, understanding, and the life’s work of innumerable careful scientists, we have seemingly gone well beyond the pallid mischief of “clickbait.” We have seemingly contrived something like “information terrorism” — if that can be a thing.

The goal of terrorism is to hold the vital attention hostage, to infiltrate culture at large and shift its currents. Where coercion is involved there may be some specific objective, but our own reality suggests that the goal may simply be to savage social norms and ravage peace of mind. The aim of anarchists is not a system that works better, but no system at all. The terrorism in the constant background of our routines and ruminations seems to want nothing more from us than our unfailing attention. It tells us: this is how the world is now, so you will not go through a day without homage directed here.

Ultimately, terrorism is a message, however pointless and aimless and abstruse. Terrorism is a memo. Terrorism is information coercing us by commanding our anxious preoccupation and an army of attendant inconveniences. Which leads us back to: can information be terrorism?

These reflections follow a great debacle of public health, with innumerable lives at stake: counter-culture guidelines encouraging people to keep eating processed meat.

We heard only recently, and rightly, that diet is the leading cause of premature death in our culture, killing at a scale vastly beyond the toll of bullets and bombs. Admittedly, of course, bullets and bombs are more immediate; there is more ghastly carnage in plain view. But for sheer scale, years lost from lives, and life lost from years, year after year, diet is massively more lethal. Isn’t it terrifying, if not terrorizing, to be told that our food is the leading source of disease and demise threatening us and those we love — and then get diametrically clashing messages about how to fix it?

If processed meat is not a problem, and added sugar is not a problem…then where are the problems that account for poor diet as the leading cause of premature death, as it is known to be? Must we now anticipate “guidelines” based on such methods advising against intake of whole vegetables and fruits (for want of evidence); in favor of consuming ultraprocessed foods (for want of evidence opposing)?

How can science be so readily corrupted? Science may have the force of a freight train, but sense must lay its tracks. Absent that, you get a train wreck — like the one we’ve all just witnessed. Consider that any researchers so inclined could readily apply these same methods of systematic review and grading evidence to…children running while holding scissors. They would surely find a complete lack of randomized trials, and would certainly score the evidence as extremely deficient if not absent altogether. Recent history suggests they would accordingly publish guidelines advising children to keep running with scissors.

The alleged news about meat, and before that sugar, was not science; it’s anti-science. It’s a nothingburger, or nothingbomb, lobbed at understanding to blow it up. Why? The only apparent reason is notoriety.

Science can be weaponized to blow up understanding rather than advance it. The only real defense is sense. Would that it were common.